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An Innovation Consultancy

We are experienced Communication, Innovation and L&D Experts, with a track record of delivering creative solutions for brand owners that drive business performance. The Filter Group was created to help companies innovate, supporting this aim with a range of effective training and creative solutions.

Has the chatbot bubble officially burst? Google Allo is done. Announced in 2016, it was Google’s big attempt to build a Google chatbot right into your text message conversations. Allo’s death signals something important to the tech industry: Nobody wants a chatbot listening in on their intimate conversations – especially when that chatbot is near useless.

I attended the inaugural TBD Conference at Stratford’s rather cool Here East last week. A really eclectic and energetic range of talks combined to produce a ‘Wired Live’ style event, ‘on steroids.’ This (HT @paul__armstrong ‏) is the deck from the day. One of the standout talks was from @F_StrategyClub – ‘Brand Meaning In The Age Of Macro Flux’. Well worth a read.

Nice piece from D&AD, accompanied by loads of examples – ‘Every year on our New Blood Awards, judges call on would-be winners to create insightful work, and recognise the entries rooted in powerful insight. So what is an insight, and how do you find one? An insight is a truth, and it should be the fire in your belly. It could be about anything, from a product to an audience or their behaviour.’ (reg may be necessary)

From NYT. Is Tech Too Easy To Use? ‘After all, the frictionless design of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which makes it trivially easy to broadcast messages to huge audiences, has been the source of innumerable problems, including foreign influence campaigns, viral misinformation and ethnic violence abroad. YouTube’s most famous frictionless feature — the auto-playing function that starts another video as soon as the previous one has finished — has created a rabbit-hole effect that often leads viewers down a path to increasingly extreme content. I picked up on this subject in 2017, with my piece – ‘Facile Externality’ – or when efficiency is inefficient.

Creative Review on ‘The Big Idea’ (sub necessary) – An advertising idea is a – ‘sentence which can be repeated to another creative anywhere in the world, working in any medium, which gives them the information they need to continue the campaign’. For example, ‘Show how Hamlet cigars provide solace after something goes wrong’, or ‘Demonstrate the excellence of the iPhone’s camera by celebrating the great photos it enables average people to take’.

A new service offered by Ibis hotels in Switzerland appears to suggest that for some Instagrammers, the pressure to post amazing images on the social media site may be so huge that it’s ruining their vacations. To ease the strain, the hotel chain is now offering help in the form of a “social media sitter.”

Brilliant. Russian state TV apparently became confused yesterday while airing footage of a technology forum aimed at kids. A TV reporter proclaimed that Boris the robot, “has already learned to dance and he’s not that bad.” The only problem? Boris isn’t a real robot. It’s just a man in a suit.

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It is human nature to look for reassurance in a rapidly changing world that is replete with uncertainty and inconsistency. In a search for certainty we sift through increasingly large amounts of information and as the alternatives increase, we need better reputational guidance than we have ever had before.

I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH to attend SxSW this year and (due to other work commitments, slightly later than planned) would once again like to share a personal perspective on this show — some of what I saw and what I have taken away.

A long piece this, but you can see the separate sessions listed directly below, in case you want to dive in….

Key Player’s sole aim is to make your life easy. We’re not going to waffle on about brands we’ve worked with and projects we’ve run. There are only two things we want you to know – we treat every job like it’s our first and we’ll help in anyway we can.